Since its inception in 1995, the MobiCom Conference has become the
leading forum for experts from academia, industry and government to
exchange ideas and report progress on forefront research topics on
wireless networking and mobile computing. The conference became
synonymous with technical excellence in seven short years and attracts
the worlds' top researchers in this field.

This year we can again look forward to an exciting week of sharing
technical ideas and visions with colleagues from around the world.

It was well over a year ago when the steering committee chaired by the
founder of MobiCom and SIGMOBILE, Imrich Chlamtac, asked me to take
the responsibility of the General Chair. First time I was involved
with MobiCom as Technical Program Chair was back in 1996 when it was
still in the infancy phase. This time the challenge was much greater
as the conference had reached the highest peak in recent years. It has
been a real honor and privilege to serve as the General Chair for
MobiCom 2002 and I thank Imrich and the Committee for trusting me with
this responsibility.

I want to bring an analogy between movies and conferences to your attention.

A movie makes it big if the entire team from Producers, Directors,
Actors to everybody on the set work harmoniously together and give
their best. I was fortunate to have an outstanding dream cast to lead
the effort to make this movie.

Seeing myself as the Producer of the movie I was very fortunate to
attract two best Directors, Andrew Campbell and Vaduvur Bharghavan who
made this movie, i.e., created an outstanding technical program with
the help of the best experts, Technical Program Committee Members, in
this field. Especially there was a record of nearly 400 submissions,
(i.e., writers) and Andrew and Bharghavan had the extremely difficult
task of selecting best-of-the-best papers (i.e., scripts) for an
extremely limited number (26) of slots. I want to express my sincere
thanks to both of them. In particular, my special thanks go to Andrew
who not only was a Technical Program Chair but overall he was the
backbone of this conference.

I want to thank my Assistant Producers, i.e., Co-Vice Chairs, Ravi
Jain and Jason Yi-Bing Lin for their immediate readiness to help out
when needed.

In addition the program includes 8 informative tutorials by
outstanding experts in the field brought together by Tutorial Chairs,
Nitin Vaidya and Catherine Rosenberg. My thanks go to both of
them. Especially Nitin's overall caring and dedication to MobiCom is
highly appreciated.

Moreover, there are two panels that will provide real-time discussions
and exchange of opinions amongst audience and panelists on very timely
topics. The panels were put together by Ness Shroff and Marie-Jose
Montpetite. I express my sincere thanks to them and also to the
panelists.

We also have an exceptional student poster session (first time in this
conference) put together by S. J. Lee and Elisabeth Belding-Royer. I
thank them for an excellent job.

Moreover, we have 6 workshops that reflect important new research
directions including the newly launched workshops on sensor networks
and wireless security. Thanks for the organizers of these excellent
workshops. The leading effort of Workshop General Chairs, Mehmet Ulema
and Ty Znati, are also greatly appreciated.

The financial matters were in hands of Ed Knightly who did an
outstanding job to keep the books orderly. Thanks to Ed.

I also express my appreciation to the registration chairs, Suresh
Singh and Robin Kravets, for their efforts. I also would like to
acknowledge the equally invaluable efforts and contributions of Marwan
Krunz and Chuanyi Ji who publicize the conference, Ramesh Govindan for
raising sponsorship for the conference through these tough times in
the industry and Ron Hutchins for putting together an interesting and
exciting demo/expo program.

First time this year we received a generous grant from NSF, (thanks to
Ty Znati and Aubrey Bush) under the leadership of Violet Syrotiuk and
Michael Yuguang Fang to support graduate students from USA to attend
the conference. Violet and Mike received 82 applications and selected
a very small percentage of them. Hereby I welcome these students to
the conference and hope to see them as future stars in this research
community. I also thank Violet and Mike for a superb job.

David Johnson was helpful with the production of proceedings and
related brochures. My sincere appreciation to David for his incredible
dedication to MobiCom.

Last but not least, R. Sivakumar, is the key person, to realize this
conference. I also learned myself that the Local Arrangements Chair is
the one, who indeed arranges everything. Special thanks go to Siva.

Finally, the support of the ACM and ACM SIGMOBILE (Executive
Producers) is greatly appreciated.

You are the audience and without you there will be no movie, i.e., no
conference. I thank you for attending the conference and being a part
of this very important event. I sincerely hope you will like our
movie. Now sit back, relax and enjoy it.

It gives us great pleasure to welcome you to ACM MobiCom 2002, the
Eighth ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
in Atlanta, Georgia. MobiCom has grown in prestige since its
inception in 1995 to become the leading technical meeting to hear
about the latest and most exiting developments in mobile networking
and computing. As the global interest in mobile and wireless research
and development surges, the interest in MobiCom has grown each
year. This year's response to the call for papers reflects that
growing interest. We received 364 paper submissions from 28 countries,
representing a growth of 30% over last year's record-breaking number
of submissions.

The job of the program committee was made more difficult by the large
volume of submissions. However, our program committee responded to
this challenge with their willingness to go the extra mile. All
submitted papers were judged based on their quality through
double-blind reviewing, where the identities of the authors were
withheld from the reviewers. The review process included a quick
reject phase (for papers that were clearly out of scope or
substandard), and, first and second round reviews. The program
committee members reviewed all papers with each paper receiving three
independent first round reviews. This was followed by a second round
review, which promoted consensus between different reviewers. During
the second round review phase there was considerable amount of online
discussion for each paper in order to reach consensus, with the result
that papers were either recommended to be rejected or to be further
discussed at the program committee meeting. Additional reviews were
sort prior to the program committee meeting particularly in the case
of papers that had reviews with diverging opinions or where no
consensus could be reached during the second round review phase. Prior
to the meeting each paper had on average five reviews (including the
second round review) from program committee members.

The program committee meeting was held at Columbia University on
Monday June 24, 2002. Sixty-six papers were discussed at the meeting
which started at 8.30 AM and completed with the selection of a program
of 26 papers at 7.30 PM. Forty-five out of fifty program committee
members were physically present at the meeting with each committee
member reviewing on average 26 papers. We are indebted to the program
committee for their time, effort and enthusiasm. The quality of the
conference is testament to their expertise and dedication. We
thoroughly enjoyed working with them.

We would like to acknowledge the efforts of a number of people who
helped guide and assist us in the review process. First, we would like
to thank our General Chair Ian F. Akyildiz, and past program chairs
Mahmoud Naghshineh and Michele Zorzi for their assistance. We would
like to thank Martha Steenstrup for chairing the committee that
selected the best student paper. Finally, we would like to thank two
PhD students at Columbia University who provided a considerable amount
of help to us. Between them, Stephen T. Chou and Michael E. Kounavis
designed and managed the MobiCom 2002 website, and tailored and
managed the EDAS paper review system.

We are extremely pleased with the final technical paper program and
would like to thank all the authors that submitted papers to MobiCom
2002. The selected papers cover a broad range of topics that attendees
will find of great interest including sessions on security, media
access control, transport layer issues, WLANs, sensor networks, energy
efficient systems, wireless QOS, systems issues, and future research
challenges. The paper program is complemented by informative
tutorials, thought provoking panels, an exceptional student poster
session (new to MobiCom), and workshops that reflect important new
research directions.

We hope you will find the conference insightful and enjoyable. We look
forward to meeting you in Atlanta!